HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-04-02T09:40:46.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
items: Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
items: Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
items: Robert Burns: 7 facts about the life and work of Scotland's national bard
items: The poetry and protest of Siegfried Sassoon
items: 5 influential WW1 poets you should know about
items: 7 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Oscar Wilde
items: Mary, Queen of Scots: what happened to her ladies-in-waiting?
items: Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry
items: Love, loss and distorted memories

"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
type: item
date: 2026-03-25T15:30:41.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Tudor
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
subject: Tudor life
description: Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions illustrate key themes of everyday life
encoded: “There shall be no more cakes and ale” Puritan hypocrisy Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy. Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-171071495webready-c1637ad-e1774448528234.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A figure dressed in theatrical, jester‑style attire poses against a sepia, textured backdrop. They wear a tall hat with a pom‑pom, a large ruffled collar, and a voluminous dark cloak. One hand holds a slender staff; the other holds a small object topped with a circular shape" title="Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This pompous Puritan is ridiculed for censuring ‘ales’ (festive social gatherings) (Image by Getty Images)" /> In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper. In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Purit…

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Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:52.000Z
creator: Professor Islam Issa
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
description: John Milton was an English radical polemicist and poet, whose magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has influenced artistic endeavours since its publication. On the 350th anniversary of his death, Islam Issa explores the story of the man who lived in revolutionary times, and who lost two wives, his liberty and his sight – but never his hope
encoded: John Milton was an early riser. He woke each morning with poetry in his head, itching for it to be recorded. The verses came to him during the night, he said – a special delivery from his very own lyrical muse. By 1652, he had completely lost his sight, so the disgruntled Milton had to wait patiently for a scribe to arrive. In the popular imagination, one of them was his daughter, Deborah, who has been depicted putting pen to paper as her father dictates his intricate poetry. Milton’s biographer wrote that on some days, when it took longer than usual for someone to begin transcribing, the poet “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked”. That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete. It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost. Tumultuous times John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics. The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy. In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an intere…

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Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:41.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical people
subject: Letters
subject: Poetry
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Runes – those instantly recognisable characters inscribed on stone, wood and bone – are filled with mystery, but can reveal little-known aspects of everyday Viking life. Eleanor Barraclough deciphers runes that recount tales of love, lust, travel and tragedy from a millennium ago
encoded: The Vikings are best known for their bloody raids, bawdy gods and buried ships. But they are also famous for the runes – the Nordic branch of the spiky north Germanic alphabet still so familiar today. Though Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, runes were the chief exception, lying at the intersection between text and object. In the same way that the word ‘alphabet’ is derived by combining the Greek letters ⍺ (alpha) and β (beta), the Nordic equivalent, ‘futhark’, is derived from the first six letters of the writing system: ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u), ᚦ (th), ᚬ (a), ᚱ (r), ᚴ (k). Surprisingly, because they represent such a recognisable and well-known form of ancient writing, no one knows for certain where runes came from. It’s probably no coincidence that many of the oldest interpretable runic inscriptions discovered – dating from the second century AD – were found in a context that shows evidence of contact with the Roman empire. The shape of runic characters are similar to many letters of the Latin alphabet, but with an angular shape more suited for carving into hard materials such as wood, bone and stone. It’s likely that knowledge of the Roman writing system travelled north with people who had spent time on both sides of the imperial frontier along the Rhine, whether as mercenaries, traders or craftspeople. Want to know more about the Vikings? Professor Ryan Lavelle leads our four-week HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course, available to HistoryExtra subscribers This might also explain one possible meaning of the word ‘rune’ itself: something secret or hidden, originally reserved for a particular segment of society – an elite group. As the centuries passed, though, knowledge and use of runes spanned an ever-broader proportion of society. The Viking Age is typically considered to encompass roughly the years 750–1100 AD – the period during which people of Scandinavian origins and heritage took part in overseas raiding, trading and settlement. At its height, the Norse diasp…

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Robert Burns: 7 facts about the life and work of Scotland's national bard
type: item
date: 2024-01-25T11:20:00.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
subject: Trends-Anniversary
description: Famed as Scotland's national bard, Robert Burns (1759–96) penned many famous verses including 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Address to a Haggis'. His life and work are celebrated by many Scots on Burns Night, 25 January, on the anniversary of the poet's work. Dr Ronnie Young, senior lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, shares seven lesser-known facts about the Scottish hero…
encoded: Who was Robert Burns? Robert Burns, famed as Scotland’s national bard or the ploughman poet, is renowned for verses such as ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Address to a Haggis’, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. However, the popular perception of Burns can mask a complex and at times contradictory character with a rich and varied legacy of poems and songs, from the tender and sentimental to the cuttingly satirical and politically radical. Here, we take a brief look at some lesser-known facts about the man and his work… The myth of the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ A number of myths surround Robert Burns. One of the most enduring of these is the idea of the "heaven-taught ploughman". This phrase was first coined in 1786, in an early review of Burns’s poetry by Henry Mackenzie, one of the leading critics in Edinburgh at that time. Such gentlemen critics viewed Burns as an "original genius" and prodigy due to his humble status, rural background and supposed ‘lack’ of formal education. While Burns himself often played up to this image of the "simple bard / unbroke by rules of art", he was in fact a highly well-read and cultivated individual. The young Burns was schooled by a private tutor, John Murdoch, who had been hired by Burns’s father. Despite occasional claims to possess little learning, Burns elsewhere parades his education; in a famous letter to author and travel writer Dr John Moore of August 1787, for example, he displays a strong familiarity with literary greats such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke, Alexander Pope and Tobias Smollett. He also left an extensive library when he died. Read more | St Andrew’s Day: 11 things you might not know about Scotland’s patron saint Another myth that grew up around Burns was his reputed fondness for drink. We know that Burns was a convivial character, as celebrated frequently in his poems and songs. However, in the wake of his death in 1796, biographers began to exaggerate Burns’s ‘intemperance’. In 1797,…

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The poetry and protest of Siegfried Sassoon
type: item
date: 2022-05-20T07:05:42.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: First World War
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
description: He is remembered as one of the greatest poets of his generation. But what drove Siegfried Sassoon to decry the horrors of World War I so publicly, even when he risked facing the wrath of his own side?
encoded: Before Britain had declared its involvement in the First World War , Siegfried Loraine Sassoon had signed up. He would later allude to “serious aspirations to heroism” that took him from his life of a country gentleman in Kent – where he had been born on 8 September 1886, grown up in a wealthy family, and spent his twenties enjoying fox hunting, cricket and writing poetry – to the battlefield in the name of king and country. Sassoon kept writing as a soldier: his verse befitting the jingoistic and glory-fuelled works of many poets at the start of war, like Rupert Brooke. Q&A | How old was the youngest known soldier to fight in WW1? “War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free,” reads his 1915 poem, Absolution. And serving on the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Lieutenant Sassoon distinguished himself. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions during a raid on a German trench, where he stayed for 90 minutes under fire to assist the wounded and dying. Such was his fearlessness – he once captured a section of enemy trench singlehandedly – that his men nicknamed him ‘Mad Jack’. Siegfried Sassoon's war poems Sassoon was, for all intents and purposes, a good soldier, but he would become a vocal opponent to the war. In 1915, his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli campaign and his poetry grew angry, bitter and acerbic. He depicted the suffering in the trenches and hospitals while satirising and condemning the military leaders who sent tens of thousands to their deaths. One of his 1917 poems starts with a general cheerily greeting troops on their way to Arras with a “Good-morning, good-morning!” before matter-of-factly being followed with the lines: “Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead / And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine”. Read more | Five WW1 poets you should know about Shortly after writing The General – one of the dozens of anti-war poems he penned, making him …

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5 influential WW1 poets you should know about
type: item
date: 2020-08-03T11:30:37.000Z
creator: Ellie Cawthorne
subject: 20th Century
subject: First World War
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
description: From scathing verses on the horrors of life in the trenches to laments on the tragedy of a lost generation, the First World War inspired some of British poetry's most poignant and affecting work. Here, Ellie Cawthorne highlights five influential British writers whose lives and work were shaped by the conflict…
encoded: Learn more about five influential British poets whose lives and work were shaped by the First World War… Hedd Wyn In the autumn of 1917, far from the front lines of France, large crowds gathered in Birkenhead for the Welsh National Eisteddfod. A central part of the cultural festival was a poetry competition, in which poets submitted work under pseudonyms with the hope of winning a prestigious ceremonial ‘bardic chair’. However, war cast its long shadow over the festival that year. When the pseudonym of winning poet was announced at the awards ceremony, trumpets sounded and applause ensued. Yet no one stepped forward to claim the prize. It was revealed that the winner – a young poet known by the bardic name Hedd Wyn (meaning ‘blessed peace’) – had been killed in battle just six weeks earlier. As the bardic chair was swathed in black cloth, the shockwaves were palpable. “No words can adequately describe the wave of emotion that swept over the vast audience when Wyn’s bardic chair was draped with the symbols of mourning," one newspaper reported. Wyn’s absence that day was emblematic of a lost generation of men who would never return home. Read more | 10 First World War slang words we still use today Hedd Wyn, whose real name was Ellis Humphrey Evans, had been raised on a sheep farm in Gwynedd, north Wales. By the time he enlisted with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he was already a well-respected Welsh-language poet. Despite his relatively young age, Wyn had already won five other bardic chairs. However, his promising talent was cut short. Soon after arriving on the western front in June 1917, he was killed in one of the opening attacks of the battle of Passchendaele, on 31 July 1917. Wyn had begun his award-winning poem Yr Arwr, or ‘The Hero’, after enlisting, finishing it on the front lines. Shortly before his death, he had also composed another of his most famous poems, War (originally written in the Welsh language): Why was I born into this age In which mankind has exi…

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7 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Oscar Wilde
type: item
date: 2020-02-06T12:05:10.000Z
creator: Elinor Evans
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Family and parenting
subject: Poetry
description: The Anglo-Irish Victorian playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was the toast of 1890s London, famous for his society plays and flamboyant wit, as well as his support of aestheticism. He later became known for his affairs with men and, after two hugely public and damaging trials, Wilde was in 1895 convicted of 'gross indecency' – a charge which criminalised homosexual people that no longer exists in the UK – and sentenced to two years' imprisonment
encoded: The final three years of Oscar Wilde's life were spent in exile in France and Italy, suffering abuse and humiliation, before he died impoverished in a Paris hotel. Here, we bring you seven surprising facts about Oscar Wilde… He was a proud Irishman Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a respected eye and ear doctor who revolutionised the treatment of ear infections (and also gained an unfortunate reputation for womanising; before his marriage he was the father of three children by two different women out of wedlock). Oscar’s mother was Jane Elgee, an Anglo-Irish revolutionary poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza. Growing up, Wilde was influenced by both his mother’s Irish nationalist politics and his father’s philanthropic tendencies. He was schooled at their family home in Merrion Square before going on to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and later attending Trinity College, Dublin, where he was introduced to the Greek literature that would greatly influence his later works and beliefs. Wilde’s Anglo-Irish background is often forgotten – perhaps because of his quintessentially ‘British’ writings – though he himself was proud of his Irish heritage. When an 1892 production of his provocative play Salomé was banned from the London stage, ostensibly due to its portrayal of biblical figures, Wilde is known to have remarked on the small-mindedness of the English censors, saying: "I am not English; I'm Irish which is quite another thing." He believed in ‘art for art’s sake’ While at Trinity, and later at the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College (which he attended between 1874 to 1878), Wilde was known for his support of aestheticism – an intellectual movement which centred on the idea that art should not exist for any other motive other than beauty. Drawing on the work of 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, aesthetes baulked against the Victorian idea that art could be a t…

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Mary, Queen of Scots: what happened to her ladies-in-waiting?
type: item
date: 2019-08-14T09:00:06.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Castles
subject: Poetry
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: They witnessed first-hand the most eventful periods in Mary Stuart's life, accompanying her everywhere and enjoying the lavish court entertainments so important to 16th-century monarchy. But what happened to the four girls appointed to be companions and, later, ladies-in-waiting, to the Queen of Scots?
encoded: Melita Thomas, editor of Tudor Times, investigates the fate of Mary's ladies... “Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael and me” So runs the old ballad, remembering the four friends and companions of a fifth Mary – Mary Stuart, the romantic and ill-fated Queen of Scots. The queen’s fate is well known – she was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587 for her complicity in a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I. But who were her four Marys, and what became of them? Mary Stuart was Mary, Queen of Scots in her cradle. Her early years were spent in an atmosphere of unease as her mother, Marie de Guise, sought to protect her from the predatory Scottish nobles who fought for the regency and for control of the little queen. The nobility was divided between those who supported the traditional French and Catholic alliance that Marie represented, and those who looked to a newly Protestant England to support the burgeoning Scottish Reformation. Who betrayed Mary, Queen Of Scots? Despite this tension, Marie de Guise sought to give her daughter a happy childhood, and appointed four girls to be her companions and, later, ladies-in-waiting. What all the girls had in common, as well as their Christian name, was noble birth and similarity in age to the queen. There was also – whether deliberately or not – a pun in the choice of girls called Mary, as ‘marie’ was the Scots word for a maid, derived from the Icelandic ‘maer’. The ballad above is slightly wrong on the names – they were Seton, Beaton, Fleming and Livingston. Fleming’s mother, Janet, Lady Fleming was the illegitimate half-sister of Mary’s father, James V, and Livingston was the daughter of the queen’s guardian, Alexander, 5th Lord Livingston of Callendar. Beaton’s grandfather was first cousin to Cardinal David Beaton, one of the men vying for the role of regent, while Seton was the daughter of George, 4th Lord Seton, and she and Bea…

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Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry
type: item
date: 2018-08-08T06:00:18.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Poetry
subject: Soldiers
description: David Reynolds explores how commemoration of the First World War has changed over the past 100 years...
encoded: At first sight, British remembrance of war has changed little over the last century. The Cenotaph and the Two-Minute Silence date from 1919, the Poppy Appeal from 1921. Yet the continuity of ritual masks profound changes in British attitudes to remembrance. To explore these changes takes us into broader issues of national identity and even foreign policy. The Great War was the deadliest in Britain’s history, with nearly three quarters of a million killed. It was impossible to bring such a large number of bodies home. Indeed many soldiers had been literally blown to bits by shellfire and their remains were never found. So the dead were interred and commemorated along the battlefronts in nearly a thousand cemeteries and monuments constructed by the Imperial War Graves Commission in one of the biggest public works projects of the 1920s. Among the missing was Jack Kipling – only son of the celebrated author Rudyard Kipling – who was last seen stumbling in agony across the battlefield of Loos in September 1915 with half his face blown off. Jack could have got a medical exemption because of short-sight but he and his father were gung-ho patriots. After 1918 Kipling threw his energies into the war graves project, like the architect Edwin Lutyens and the administrator Fabian Ware. Too old to fight, these were men consumed with grief and probably guilt about the young men who had been sent to their deaths. During the war itself the public knew little of the gruesome reality of modern industrialised killing. Press reporters were strictly controlled and there was virtually no film footage of combat or bodies. But during the twenties, the veil was partially lifted in veterans’ novels and memoirs. Particularly powerful was the play Journey’s End by RC Sherriff. Set in a gloomy dugout on the western front, it depicted British soldiers bickering and drinking as they psyched themselves up for the next German onslaught. The 1928 play had little action but it proved a runaway West En…

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Love, loss and distorted memories
type: item
date: 2018-06-12T09:29:14.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Poetry
subject: Remembrance Day
description: We've allowed memoirs to shape our perception of the First World War without paying due attention to their drawbacks for the historian, says Mark Bostridge
encoded: This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine In the early weeks of the First World War, a young woman in an English provincial town happened to bump into a man whose proposal of marriage she had rejected in no uncertain terms the previous year. In her diary she recorded her strong disapproval of him for not having responded immediately to the call of duty by enlisting in the army. The language she used to describe him was reminiscent of the ‘White Feather Brigade’, the band of women across Britain who had recently begun a campaign to humiliate men perceived as ‘idlers and loafers’ into enlisting. White feathers were being distributed to any man who appeared to fit the description ‘selfish shirker’. The woman meeting her former suitor didn’t go so far as to present him with a white feather, but in her diary she recorded “his obvious strength and suitability for military work”, and branded him a “shirker”. Not long before, this same woman had shown her younger brother an appeal in the newspapers for unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 30 to join the army. Her brother had immediately become enthusiastic about volunteering, and had set about trying to offer himself as a recruit. His sister’s eagerness to support his desire to enlist was matched only by their father’s obduracy in opposing the plan. As the brother was 18 and under military age, he needed his father’s consent before his application could be accepted by the War Office; this his father at first withheld, much to his sister’s fury. In her diary she fulminated against her father, reproaching him for his “unmanliness” and for not possessing the “requisite courage”. Her younger brother did eventually obtain their father’s permission, and was gazetted as a second lieutenant in a battalion of the Sherwood Foresters. Two years later, he showed great courage in action on one of the most terrible days of slaughter in the history of the British Army, the first day of the battl…

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